How I Realized To What I Want To Dedicate My Life
Every step of this application has been an eye-opener for me. Sometimes us high school students forget to look back at our upbringings and how it decides who we are today. I for one have detached most of my life story from my memory due to one thing I decided to accept at a much younger age: I can’t change the past.
Middle school is one of the earliest experiences I can remember changing me. Overconfidence was what defined my first year of middle school. Before that, I have always excelled at all the standard subjects; English, and especially Math was where I excelled in skill. I never needed to work for any grades, I was always praised as excelling above average and surpassing the other students at my elementary school. By the time I had been admitted into Gaiser Middle School, I was a year ahead in math. However, attending seventh-grade math as a sixth grader, I felt the pressure of not understanding something the teacher was saying for the first time. I dismissed this, thinking that I was “above it,” as if I already knew the subjects we would later cover in the class so there was so need to study now like everyone else.
As I started to worry more about my grades, I ended up checking them one day to reveal an ‘F’ in the math class, the one subject I thought I could pass without effort. Before me, my family never felt praised for being above average, so I had no shame in talking to my math teacher about dropping the class into something appropriate for my grade level. My teacher was appalled. She looked me straight in the eyes, something no other educator has done to me before, and she affirmed me. “You are not going down a grade level.” I didn’t know what to say, but before I could react, she pulled up a page showing my information and explained the results from the standardized test conducted not long before. She said despite my grade in the class, I somehow managed to obtain a score allowing me to skip another whole grade level of math. It was unreal; I realized how much potential I had, if I would just put in the effort and keep up with the classwork, I could do great things. In the remaining weeks of the trimester, I managed to pull my failing grade to a B+.
Something else happened in middle school that I know is worth mentioning. This time it was my third year there, eighth grade. I walked into the art class at the beginning of the day and instantly realized something about the mood was off. The teacher was silent as usual, but her face was a luscious red. No one seemed to make a sound; I didn’t understand. Seated in my assigned chair, she started to read a paper while holding back tears. It was then I learned that one of the children in a lower grade level made the decision to end his life. At this point, I too held back tears. Suicide was something I never understood until that day, and yet I still refused to accept that someone as young as him thought suicide was their only escape. Up to this point I had been relatively apathetic towards issues pertaining to life, but even though I didn’t know the person who did it, the thought that I could have done something to prevent it tore me apart. If only I had tried to do something as little as talking to them I could have changed the outcome for the better.
Fast forward to my sophomore year in high school. I was entangled in my studies, I considered what I was doing to be an endless torture. I laid on my bed trying to sleep, but my thoughts regarding life purpose worried me endlessly. I thought it would be a lot easier if I just didn’t do anything, quit school, maybe even quit life. But there was one thing that stopped me, I thought about how I felt after hearing about the boy in middle school. I thought about how much potential he had, and how I would never want to make anyone else feel the way I did. I discovered that I still had the potential to do great things with my life, even if what was happening at that moment was not in my favor. That night I decided to dedicate my life to make the greatest possible impact I could on our species. I decided to use the talents and skills I have always had, but apply them for the betterment of mankind.
